Welcome to the O'Doherty Lab

The
ability to make decisions requires neural machinery that has been honed
through evolution to enable animals to learn about the structure of
their environment and uncover causal links between their own behavior
and the probability of obtaining rewards.

A deeper understanding of how
the brain does this will not only inspire new theories of decision
making, it will also contribute to the development of genuine
"artificial intelligence", and it will enable us to understand why some
humans are better than others at making decisions, why humans with
certain psychiatric disorders or brain lesions are less capable of
doing so, and why under some circumstances humans systematically fail
to make "rational" decisions.

The goal of our research is to unravel the neural computations underlying this process in the human brain.